PALESTINE

The United Nations' top human rights body has voted to send a team of international war crimes investigators to probe the deadly shootings of Gaza protesters by Israeli forces.

A resolution calling on the UN Human Rights Council to "urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry" was backed on Friday by 29 members.

The members - United States and Australia - voted against and 14 abstained.

Investigators must "investigate all alleged violations and abuses ... in the context of the military assaults on large scale civilian protests that began on 30 March 2018", the approved resolution said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday compares Israel’s actions against the Palestinians in Gaza to the Nazi persecution of the Jews in World War II.

“There is no difference between the atrocity faced by the Jewish people in Europe 75 years ago and the brutality that our Gaza brothers are subjected to,” he tells a summit of Islamic leaders in Istanbul.

When will the moment come in which the mass killing of Palestinians matters anything to the right? When will the moment come in which the massacre of civilians shocks at least the left-center? If 60 people slain don’t do it, perhaps 600? Will 6,000 jolt them?

When will the moment come in which a pinch of human feeling arises, if only for a moment, toward the Palestinians? Sympathy? At what moment will someone call a halt, and suggest compassion, without being branded an eccentric or an Israel hater?

When will there be a moment in which someone admits that the slaughterer has, after all, some responsibility for the slaughter, not only the slaughtered, who are of course responsible for their own slaughter?

The split-screen juxtaposition had most of us trembling with anger. On the left, here was Ivanka Trump, the US president's daughter, beaming at the inauguration plaque outside the new US embassy in Jerusalem. On the right, Palestinians in Gaza were being pulled from the carnage of a bloodbath. At last count, at least 60 Palestinians were massacred. Another 2,700 injured by bullets and tear gas fumes. Gaza remains in trauma.

And while the usual tropes of Hamas involvement in inciting the protest movement have been spilling from American and Israeli mouthpieces - be they politicians, commentators or columnists - this week's devastating events left even the most neutral of observers stunned. How was it possible, in the 21st century, that such an atrocity could play out without consequence?

One should ask, “Why are Palestinians protesting?” before cheering for their death in Gaza. Blaming Hamas is a talking point that hides many facts and realities. In the last few days, 85 Palestinians have been shot to death and 2000+ have been shot and wounded — including 200 doctors, paramedics and journalists — by Israeli snipers. Number of Israelis injured: ZERO!...

Israeli officials announced Friday that they will completely refuse all cooperation with the new UN probe into the Nakba Day killings of 61 Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border. The protesters were killed by Israeli troops.

A UN Security Council resolution failed to agree on the probe, when it was vetoed by the United States. The UN Human Rights Council, where no veto power exists, held a special session agreeing to send international investigators into the probe.

It was the deadliest single day in the Gaza Strip since the 2014 Israeli invasion. The incident lead to substantial international outcry. Israeli officials argued that the number of deaths were themselves of no consequence, likening it to killing Nazis.

The Trump administration is aiming to roll out its much-hyped but long-delayed Middle East peace plan next month amid signs it may further alienate the Palestinians by slashing millions of dollars in funding for humanitarian and development projects in the West Bank and Gaza.
Note: There will be no decrease of funds for Israeli....ever, just increases and more military aid so Israel can defend itself against slight shots and kites with burning tails!

"Israel completely rejects the resolution that was adopted by an automatic anti-Israel majority whose results were known from the start," he said. "Israel will continue to defend its citizens and soldiers as it has the right to defend itself."
Note: Sick of hearing "right to defend itself" "holocaust" "anti-Semitic"

"They are, in essence, caged in a toxic slum from birth to death," he said of the Gazans on Friday, adding the occupation must come to an end.
Israel defended its forces, and denounced Zeid’s statement. Indeed, UN ambassador Aviva Raz Shechter called his comments "politically motivated.”
Note: Let's get our terminology correct. Israel is terrorist. Israel is Illegal occupier.

Since the demonstrations began March 30, more than 110 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,500 wounded by live fire, according to the Health Ministry.
Note: Israel continues to state it has a right to defend ourselves and our borders! except it has no borders!!

t a special summit in Turkey convened by President Tayyip Erdogan, they also pledged to take "appropriate political (and) economic measures" against countries that followed the United States in moving their Israel embassies to contested Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.
Erdogan, who is campaigning for re-election next month, used the summit to verbally attack Israel, comparing the actions of its forces to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews in World War Two, when millions were killed in concentration camps.
Note: Ignorant comparison to Germany. Millions were not killed,hospitals were provided.

Israel's military says wounded Palestinians in Gaza were transferred to Jordan for medical treatment and that Jordanian trucks packed with medical supplies have entered the territory.
Note: Why wouldn't they be transferred to Israeli hospitals Israelis shot them and why doesn't Israel provide medical supplies.

Israel railed against the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday as it voted to set up a probe into recent killings in Gaza and accused Israel of excessive use of force.
The resolution to send a commission of inquiry to investigate was rejected by the United States and Australia, but backed by 29 members of the 47-state U.N. forum. Another 14 countries, including Britain, Germany and Japan, abstained.
Israel's ambassador in Geneva, Aviva Raz Shechter, castigated the council for "spreading lies against Israel" during "five hours of ludicrous statements".

Israeli forces killed two Palestinian children on Monday and Tuesday during protests east of al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.

Israeli forces shot Bilal al-Ashram, 17, in the chest with live ammunition around 7 p.m. on Tuesday, a day after shooting 16-year-old Talal Matar in the head, Defense for Children International - Palestine’s preliminary investigation found. Both children were unarmed, according to initial reports. The two children are among 14 Palestinians under the age of 18 to be killed by Israeli forces in the context of “March of Return” protests near the perimeter fence in the Gaza Strip between March 30 and May 15.

Unlike protestant Arch-Zionist senator Lindsey Graham, who declared "If You Got a Problem with US Embassy in Jerusalem "Take it Up with God", the Catholic Bishops stated, "The protests by Palestinians are fueled by desperation due to the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza...Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem was a provocative and unhelpful step in the pursuit of peace."

Israel is depriving 1.9 million people in Gaza of basic rights and creating inhumane conditions, according to a UN human rights chief. He has also castigated the use of lethal force by Israel during the recent protests.
“They are, in essence, caged in a toxic slum from birth to death; deprived of dignity; dehumanised by the Israeli authorities,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein stated.

The UN human rights watchdog called a special session on Friday in the wake of “appalling” events in Gaza. Some 87 Palestinians, including 12 children, were killed by Israeli security forces since March 30, with more than 40 fatalities and more than 1,300 injured on Monday alone, the UN estimates.

Gaza is a small, densely populated sliver of land whose 1.8 million inhabitants have been suffering under an Israeli blockade for the past 11 years (with Egyptian cooperation). Half of Gaza’s population is under 16 years of age. The unemployment rate is 44%. Knowledgeable people call it an open air prison controlled by Israel.

Can we really? In our name, horrors are committed, supposedly so that we would be able to “sleep well at night”. To have a “safe haven”, while others are uprooted from their homes, maimed and killed for protesting the injustice.

We constantly downplay this horror, because looking it in the eye means not only scrutinizing Israeli policy, but its very existence as a “Jewish state”. It means to scrutinize Zionism, and so few want to do that.

This is really what is looking at us through the fences at the Great March of Return. Sure, many want to frame it as “terrorist”, not because of the actions, but because of the notion – the notion of “return” is for Zionists synonymous with “destruction” and “denial of our right to exist” – as a “Jewish state”, that is.

A group of us supported a local Baptist minister and his wife to join a mostly clergy Sabeel witness trip to Palestine three weeks ago. This morning I received the following video taken by one of them of Israeli soldiers creating havoc in Nebi Saleh, a "suburb" of Jerusalem. Please watch it and see for yourself what we as Americans are supporting with our tax dollars.

The Arab League called Thursday for an international probe into alleged crimes by Israeli forces against Palestinians following mass protests on the Gaza border that saw dozens of demonstrators killed.

Tens of thousands have protested along Gaza's border with Israel since March 30 calling for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their homes now inside Israel.

The largest demonstrations coincided with the move of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Monday, which saw Israeli forces kill some 60 Palestinians.

Vietnam, on Thursday, renewed its firm position in supporting the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, including the establishment of an independent state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

During the ministry’s weekly press conference, which focused on the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem and the violence in the Gaza Strip, head of the Press and Information Department of Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry, Le Thi Thu Hang noted that Vietnam’s position was that all solutions concerning the city of Jerusalem should comply with international law, in particular with United Nations resolutions, with the consent of the relevant parties.

But there’s a stupendous historical irony to Israel’s manufactured outrage: Israel itself claimed that a far less stringent embargo by Egypt in 1967 was a legitimate casus belli for Israel to attack Egypt (which led to Israel seizing control of Gaza and eventually imposing the embargo on it).

Israel opened fire first during the Six-Day War on June 5, 1967, with an air and land attack on Egypt. But, Israel declared, Egypt had actually started the war several weeks before, when it blockaded the Straits of Tiran, which prevented Israel from shipping goods through the Red Sea.

But if it were legal for Israel to bomb and invade Egypt in 1967 and then occupy Palestinian land for decades, it logically follows that Palestinians in Gaza have had the right to attack and occupy Israel ever since the Israeli blockade began in 2007. Fair’s fair.

Palestinians protesting at the Gaza fence posed no threat whatsoever and even if they were trying to cross the border, you don’t use live fire to kill them, says Diana Buttu in this inerview with Dennis J. Bernstein.

Monstrous. Frightful. Wicked. It’s strange how the words just run out in the Middle East today. Sixty Palestinians dead. In one day. Two thousand four hundred wounded, more than half by live fire. In one day. The figures are an outrage, a turning away from morality, a disgrace for any army to create.

And we are supposed to believe that the Israeli army is one of “purity of arms”? And we have to ask another question. If it’s 60 Palestinians dead in a day this week, what if it’s 600 next week? Or 6,000 next month? Israel’s bleak excuses – and America’s crude response – raise this very question. If we can now accept a massacre on this scale, how far can our immune system go in the days and weeks and months to come?

t’s mind-blowing how people have the energy to keep repeating the same claims over and over again for days and weeks, ignoring outside information. That is why I have decided to spare others the time, effort, and emotion, by writing out the most common claims I have seen regarding the events of the Great March of Return, followed by my responses. Those interested in fact-checking these common falsehoods, can find them in one place.

The one claim that I will not deal with, one of the most popular, is that of: “The Bible say God give the land of Israel to the Jewish people?” Fundamentalists, regardless of faith, will never see beyond their own holy books. This list isn’t for them and I won’t bother trying to change their minds.

Westerners witnessed Israel’s massacre of protesters at the culmination of Gaza’s Great March of Return on 14 May mostly through bytes of imagery transmitted onto flat screens and smartphones.

They saw montages of horse-drawn carts carrying bloodied bodies and zig-zagging through thick clouds of teargas, flashes of young men charging at the high-tech fences and militarized fortifications that hold their lives in a soul-sapping stasis, rescue workers overwhelmed by the sheer number of casualties, and grainy footage of snipers in olive drab hunting their prey with laser range finders and terminating 62 lives with the flick of a trigger.

For too many in the West, the scenes of death in Gaza’s Israeli-declared no-go zone were simulacra of devastation detached from the lived reality of those who flocked to the seven weeks of protests.

“We could see very quickly that the Israelis were going to shoot a lot of people,” Tarek Loubani, a Palestinian Canadian emergency physician who treated patients in Gaza on 14 May, told The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

As Israeli forces began to shoot into the crowds, the number of Palestinians wounded in their limbs climbed. Loubani said that his paramedic team “ran out of our supply of tourniquets really early in the morning. All we had left were eight of them.”

After he retrieved more tourniquets and returned to distribute them to paramedics, he said there was a lull around him: “No burning tires, no smoke, no tear gas, nobody messing around in front of the buffer zone. Just a clearly marked medical team well away from everybody else.”

UN human rights experts* have called on the Government of Israel to rescind its decision of 7 May to cancel the work permit of Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director for Human Rights Watch, who is based in Jerusalem.

“The decision to revoke Mr. Shakir’s work permit appears connected solely to his human rights research and advocacy,” they noted, “not to any allegation of wrongdoing”.

“Deporting Mr. Shakir sends a troubling message that Israel resists the kind of human rights fact-finding and debate that Human Rights Watch and other domestic and international non-governmental organisations conduct all of the time, in almost every part of the world.”

It’s 4:30 am with the moon still high in the sky, but Palestinians from across the West Bank are already disembarking from buses outside the Qalandia checkpoint near Jerusalem. They’re about to begin a day’s work on the other side of the separation wall, in Israel.

On Monday, one day prior to the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding, the Trump administration fulfilled its promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. This move was followed by Palestinian protests in the West Bank and Gaza, with Israeli soldiers killing over 50 Palestinians, including children, and wounding over 1,000 others. Since then, debates have been raging among pundits, policymakers and everyday citizens about the struggle over Israel and Palestine. Unfortunately, many of these conversations are animated by the same stale and problematic talking points. Here are seven of the most damaging:

It was NBC’s Cal Parry who summed up the obscenity of Donald Trump’s ignorant and igniting decision to move the US Embassy to West Jerusalem, then to celebrate the inauguration on Monday, 14th May: “Well dressed American and Israeli officials on one side of the screen: desperation, death and fires on the other.”

In 1948, 700,000 Palestinians began their flight from the city and the region trying to escape the massacres by Jewish militias on that date, seventy years ago. Commemorated ever since as the day of “Nakba” – disaster, catastrophe, cataclysm – following them to this day as land is stolen, families expelled and “settlements” encroach, and Palestinian history is bulldozed.

‘ “When the massacre started the (paramilitaries) took a kid and strapped him on an army jeep and drove him around different neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, saying ‘the same will happen to you if you don’t leave,’ ” Abu Kaya said, retelling his grandfather’s story to Middle East Eye.’ (1)

Dr. Kevin Barrett writes, "Greetings from Mashhad! I’m heading back to the USA and will resume doing radio shows and False Flag Weekly News ASAP. Meanwhile here is an article on the conference.
Best, Kevin."

The international community is condemning Israeli violence against Palestinians after the IDF killed more than 60 Palestinians and injured more than 2,400 on Monday in response to Palestinians protests demanding their right to return to territories seized by Israel in 1948.

Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, told Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear that Israel is now being scrutinized more than ever by the "international lens" for its human rights violations against Palestinians.

But amid the euphoria, a few Israeli commentators understood that politics is about more than power – it’s about imagery too. The champagne-quaffing in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem while Gaza drowned in blood left a profoundly sour taste in the mouth.

There was more than a whiff of hypocrisy too in statements about “defending borders” from a state that has refused to declare its borders since its creation exactly 70 years ago – as well as from a Netanyahu government currently trying to establish a Greater Israel over the Palestinian territories.

But the hypocrisy was not restricted to Israel and Washington, which parroted Mr. Netanyahu’s talking points.

There was an ugly equivocation from other western leaders. They spoke of “regret”, “tragedy” and “concern at the loss of life”, as though an act of God had struck Gaza, not an order from Israeli commanders to quell the Palestinian urge for freedom with live ammunition.

Erdogan accused Israel of "tyranny" and said Turkey would evacuate those injured from Gaza, where hospital facilities are reportedly at a breaking point.

Israel maintains its forces use of live fire is in line with both domestic and international law, arguing the demonstrations are part of the country's conflict with Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip.

A senior Israeli army spokesman admitted Tuesday that Israel failed to minimize the number of Palestinian casualties during the recent deadly protests on the Gaza border, and that some were hit by mistake. He added that Hamas won the PR war by a "knockout."

Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the international spokesman and head of social media for the Israel Defense Forces, made the comments during a Jewish community briefing organized by the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA).

The officer fiercely defended the military’s response to the recent protests along the Gaza border, in which more than 100 Palestinians were killed and thousands more wounded, most of them by live fire.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that the United Nations had "collapsed" in the face of events in Gaza where Israeli forces killed 60 Palestinian protesters on Monday as the United States relocated its Israel embassy to Jerusalem.

Turkey has been among the most vocal critics of the Israeli use of deadly force against protesters at the Gaza border and of the U.S. decision to open its new embassy in Jerusalem. It called for an emergency meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul on Friday.

Speaking at a dinner on the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Erdogan said the majority of the international community had failed to react to the events in Gaza, and warned that remaining silent would mean "opening a very dangerous door."

Putin just loves Israel!
Trump’s moving of Washington’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, an international city, demands universal condemnation.

Not from Russia, notably not after Putin shamefully welcomed Ziofascist Netanyahu as an honored guest in Moscow for the 73rd Great Patriotic War triumph commemoration.

On Monday while Israeli soldiers were massacring Gazans, Russia failed to condemn it – nor Great Friday March of Return Friday mass-killings since March 30, nor moving Washington’s Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.

Palestinians are isolated on their own, struggling valiantly against a ruthless occupier, committing high crimes with impunity because the world community fails to stop them.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says the Israeli regime should be brought before the International Criminal Court for the recent massacre of tens of Palestinians during anti-occupation protest rallies along the border between the Gaza Strip and occupied territories.

“Israel should be taken to the International Criminal Court [over the killing of Palestinians]. Since third parties cannot do it, Palestine needs to initiate this,” Cavusoglu said in an interview with state broadcaster TRT on Thursday.

The top Turkish diplomat added, “We are analyzing what kind of legal steps can be taken [against Israel]. Israel should account for its actions.”

He pointed out that the United Nations Human Rights Committee would hold a meeting in Geneva on Friday to decide on a probe into Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians.

“This crime against humanity should be probed by an independent commission and Israel should account for its actions before the law,” Cavusoglu noted.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has criticized Israel for its propaganda against the people of the Gaza Strip who have been protesting against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow on Wednesday that Israel’s statement about dozens of "peaceful" protesters killed on the Gaza border by Israeli forces on Monday was an act of blasphemy.

“I cannot agree with the fact that dozens of peaceful civilians, including children and infants, who were killed in these incidents were terrorists. This is a blasphemous statement," Lavrov said.

Hamas launched in 1988 in Gaza at the time of the first intifada, or uprising, with a charter now infamous for its anti-Semitism and its refusal to accept the existence of the Israeli state. But for more than a decade prior, Israeli authorities actively enabled its rise.

Seventy years ago, Palestinians suffered the Nakba, or catastrophe, when most fled or were forced by Zionist militias to flee Palestine to make room for the creation of the state of Israel and ensure a Jewish majority. Some 750,000 ended up as refugees registered with the United Nations. Many others fended for themselves. They were never allowed to return to their lands or homes which were confiscated by the nascent state, and many of their villages were subsequently destroyed. Here – and here, from outside Palestine – survivors tell their stories.

The mismatch between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces has often been likened to David and Goliath. Now, Goliath doesn’t even need to enter the field of combat.

In a new innovation, small drones have been used by Israel’s military to drop tear gas on Palestinian protests along the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel and in the occupied West Bank.

First seen in early March, when Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen TV filmed a group of protesters in Gaza as they were targeted by one, the gas-carrying drones were used heavily in protests in the coastal enclave and the occupied West Bank on Monday and Tuesday.

There appear to be three types of drones being used to disperse the gas.

In normal circumstances, a consensus of American Jews would have unreservedly cheered the relocation of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Jews of all stripes regard as the national capital despite international refusal to do so. In most other periods of terrorism, armed conflict or outright war, American Jews have readily rallied to the side of the Jewish state.

But the toxic partnership of Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has damaged the bonds between Jews here and Jews there. Instead of being an emblem of the entire Jewish people, Israel has overwhelmingly become the province of right-wingers -- the settlers in the West Bank, their political patrons in Israeli politics, evangelical Christians in America and the minority of this country's Jews who support its divisive president.

This week, Israeli troops shot and killed dozens of Palestinians protesting along the border fence separating southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, the deadliest violence in the region since the war there in 2014.

In response, the White House has placed the blame for the massacre squarely at the feet of Gaza’s Hamas government. Across the aisle, however, Democrats have for the most part been conspicuously silent about the violence. That silence has added a perceived vacuum of moral leadership from an energized left that has been increasingly demanding accountability from their elected officials on the issue of Israel and Palestine.

Discussing the violence on the Gaza border after the U.S. moved its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu said, “I think President Trump did a very important thing. He not only kept his promise and the promises of successive American presidents, he also recognized a simple reality. You are sitting right now in the government office of the Israeli government in Jerusalem. The prime minister’s office is right here in Jerusalem. The Israeli government, the seat of Israel’s government is in Jerusalem, which is its capital. And it has been the capital of the Jewish people ‘only’ for 3,000 years. I think that’s the key, ultimately to peace. Because a peace that’s based on lies will crash on the rocks of Middle East reality.”

A video circulating on social media claiming to be evidence that Hamas is faking deaths in Gaza does not actually portray what has been claimed. And not only that – the footage is more than four years old.

The video was shared among pro-Israel social media users in the wake of Monday’s Great Return March protests in Gaza, in which Israeli fire killed at least 60. People shared it as ‘proof’ that Hamas is either faking the number of deaths reported after Monday’s unrest or is manipulating people into feeling sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

However, the video actually dates back to 2013 and has been used as anti-Palestinian propaganda since at least 2014, when Israel’s Operation Protective Edge war on Gaza saw more than 2,200 Palestinians killed, more than 1,462 of whom were civilians, according to the UN.

In light of recent conflagrations on the Gaza Strip's border and Hamas's actions in allegedly fomenting terror, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the terror group's leaders were a "bunch of cannibals that treat their own children as armaments."

Three days ago, Jared and Ivanka Kushner, Steven Mnuchin, Sheldon Adelson, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Dean Heller (R-NV), along with House members Joe Wilson (R-SC) and Lee Zeldin (R-NY) and Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott, joined Benjamin Netanyahu and his Zionist government in celebrating the 70th anniversary of Rothschild’s Israel. (Evangelical Christian leaders Robert Jeffress, John Hagee, Paula White, Ralph Reed, Jim Garlow, Lourdes Aguirre, Ramiro Pena and Jay Strack were also there.) But the real celebration wasn’t the one attended by Kushner and Company; it was the one that took place on the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) killing fields just a few miles away. And that “celebration” mirrored the way Israel has spent its entire 70-year existence: by committing mass violence and murder against defenseless Palestinians.

The UN has allowed Israel’s massacre of Palestine against dozens of UN Resolution to restrain Israel from their aggressions on Palestine, killing tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians, women, children and men. Destroying their livelihood, schools, hospitals and living quarters. Worse, confining 2 million Palestinians in an open torture and terror camp, called Gaza.

All this under the “watchful eye” of the United Nations, thousands of Blue Helmets patrolling ‘disputed’ – aka Israeli stolen territory from Palestine and surrounding Arab nations. And the world at large – by now 193 member-nations that make up the UN – watching, observing, but not saying beep loud enough to be heard.

One of the essential features of European colonialism were the boundaries drawn between Europeans and so-called Western civilization and everyone else. Even during the European enlightenment, the accepted philosophical justifications for human inequality in Western liberal thought meant that women, the colonized, the enslaved and non-property holders occupied different rungs on the ladder of humanity and were excluded from demanding same inherent rights as the White, male bourgeoisie.

The “othering” of human beings on the basis of race, gender, religion, class and later nationality was embedded in the collective consciousness of Europe. But in the colonial context, the process of othering wasn’t just psychological but also physical. In that context the stratification of humanity into those categories of people who had rights that were recognized and everyone else, had deadly consequences for those individuals and peoples who fell into the category of “other.”

A Canadian-Palestinian doctor was shot in the legs by an Israeli sniper and one of his paramedics was killed on the Gaza border Monday as clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli Defence Forces left dozens dead and more than 1,000 wounded.

Dr. Tarek Loubani, an emergency physician from London, Ont., who is also an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario’s medical school, joined medical teams on the Gaza border Monday to care for Palestinians who might be injured in demonstrations against the inauguration of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.

Dr. Loubani, who has served as an emergency field doctor in Tanzania and conflict zones such as Iraq and southern Lebanon, said he was wearing a green surgeon’s outfit and standing with several orange-vested paramedics about 25 metres from the protests at the border when he was hit.

People are beginning to awaken to the fact that the name-calling is connected to the violent oppression. The name-calling and the smearing is the weapon the oppressors use to silence the resistance. When someone is labeled as an anti-Semite, Holocaust Denier, Conspiracy Theorist and what have you, then we don't need to listen to what they have to say. You don't need an argument. Call someone an icky name, then avoid them and tell others to avoid them.

The surprising thing is that the name-calling often comes from the mouths of those in opposition to the oppressors. When pro-Palestinian activists call other pro-Palestinian activists these names, then we know the true power of the oppressor. The oppressor controls the language of the opposition.

In theory, the relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is a big deal.

In theory. In reality, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans, an issue of history and principle long since overtaken by hard power.

People have bizarre notions about Jerusalem: to some, it's a celestial entity, barely of this earth. Billions of Jews, Christians and Muslims are taught from the cradle that it's holy. An entire city, holy. Every building, every cobblestone, every dusty rock. I apparently lived on a holy street for five years.

Even Jerusalem's official status in the eyes of the world is strange. It remains corpus separatum, which literally means separate entity — a supposedly internationalized city, the capital of neither Israel nor any Arab entity, and certainly not a place for embassies.

I didn’t expect this as I picked up my groceries in the supermarket. “BLOODBATH!” the headline screamed, churning up the hysteria that was now clawing at my throat: “SCORES DEAD, THOUSANDS WOUNDED AS ISRAEL FIRES ON PALESTINIANS PROTESTING OVER TRUMP’S NEW EMBASSY!”

Yes, it was that dreadful Daily Mail again, stirring up trouble against the noble occupiers of Palestine, nice peaceful folk doing their best to defend their stolen land from evil Hamas and the Arab scum in Gaza trying to suggest they had a right to live in their own country.

Israeli troops, I was to learn to my horror and dismay — how could such a noble race behave like this? — had killed at least 55 Palestinians in cold blood and wounded almost 2,000 more during protests in Gaza on Monday. The violence had erupted as Donald Trump’s delectable daughter Ivanka opened the new American embassy in Jerusalem — a move that was calculated to case a global outcry.

Weeping helplessly, a mother cradles her lifeless eight-month-old daughter yesterday – an apparent victim of Israeli tear gas – as a picture emerged of a double amputee using a slingshot against troops.

Mariam al-Ghandour, 17, said her daughter, Leila, died after a mix-up led to her being taken to a flashpoint in Gaza during protests.

Leila was believed to be the youngest victim of Monday’s bloodbath and one of eight children under 16 who were reportedly among 58 Palestinians killed in demonstrations.

Laila Anwar al-Ghandour, an eight-month-old baby girl, died of tear-gas inhalation at dawn, Gaza's Ministry of Health says, highlighting international outrage over the killings by Israeli soldiers of 60 Palestinians who joined in a massive protest against the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem.

Laila was the youngest fatality of the demonstrations on Monday, which were held in the run up to the 70th anniversary on Tuesday of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, the day the state of Israel was established on May 15, 1948, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

Palestinian protests on the Gaza-Israel border have dropped off over the past two days, with Israel on Wednesday citing “Egyptian efforts” to restore calm after dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli gunfire. Gaza’s dominant Islamist Hamas movement denied that it was under pressure from neighboring Egypt to scale back the six-week-old demonstrations, Reuters reports.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry is recalling its ambassadors in Romania, Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic, Reuters reported. The ministry said on Wednesday that those EU nations had participated in an official Israeli celebration marking the US Embassy’s move to Jerusalem.

How can one not feel intense grief for the young Palestinians who out of despair and fury joined the Great March of Return, and so often found death and severe injury awaiting them as they approached the border unarmed!!?

This was not a gratuitous event, or something that happened spontaneously on either side. After 70 years of Palestinian suffering, with no end of torment in sight, to show the world and each other their passion was what would be seen as normal, even admirable, demonstrating a spirit of resistance that endured after decades of repression, violence, humiliation, and denial of the most fundamental of rights. After 70 years of Israeli statehood, this violent confirmation of our worst fears and perceptions, seals a negative destiny for Israel as far as the moral eye can see.

Two spectacles unfolded in Palestine on Monday. In Gaza, Israeli army snipers shot and killed 58 Palestinians—including six children—and injured almost three thousand others amid scenes of smoke, fire, teargas, dust, agony and blood. At exactly the same time, to the tinkling of champagne glasses at a glittering reception barely fifty miles away in Jerusalem, Jared Kushner and an elegant Ivanka Trump oversaw the opening of Donald Trump’s new embassy there. The juxtaposition of these two contemporaneous scenes encapsulates at a single glance the entirety of Zionism’s murderous conflict with the Palestinian people.

All the Palestinians, including children, killed in the violence at the Israeli-Gaza border were “terrorists,” Israel’s ambassador to Belgium said. She was called to the foreign ministry shortly after the statement.

Brussels slammed the Israeli envoy to Belgium, Simona Frankel, as she did not mince words in the aftermath of the widely-condemned violence in Gaza, where at least 60 people were killed and more than 2,700 protesters were injured by Israeli fire on Monday.

Turkey has urged Islamic countries to review their ties with Israel after dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire on the Gaza border.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told his ruling party in parliament that Ankara would call an extraordinary summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

"Islamic countries should without fail review their relations with Israel," Premier Yildirim said, adding, “The Islamic world should move as one, with one voice, against this massacre."

Yildirim said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who currently holds the rotating chairmanship of the body, called the OIC summit on Friday.

Yildirim said that after the summit at 3:00 pm a giant rally would be held at the vast Yenikapi meeting area in Istanbul under the slogan of "Stop the Oppression" to express solidarity with the Palestinians.

Internal Palestinian politics resembles a swamp, and Ramallah is the murkiest part of it.

These otherwise calm waters were muddied five months ago, when the United States altered its long-standing policy on Jerusalem and local and international political actors reacted accordingly. On May 14, these changes took effect and the US Embassy was moved to a compound in Jerusalem situated on the 1949 armistice line, thus solidifying Israel's claim on the whole city.

Hundreds of protesters gathered near the site of Jerusalem's new US embassy, leading to violent clashes with police and several arrests.

Demonstrators included multiple members of the Knesset and about a dozen members from an ultra-orthodox anti-Israeli group, who reportedly held signs that read: "Jews worldwide condemn Israeli bloody brutality" and "Authentic Jewry never recognized the State of Israel."

Members of the US Congress are making some of their strongest statements ever condemning Israel after its massacre of dozens of unarmed civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip on Monday.

This comes amid growing international disquiet over the bloodshed.

“I am deeply saddened by the horrific slaughter of at least 52 Palestinian protesters and injuries to thousands more by Israeli forces,” John Yarmuth, a Democratic House member from Kentucky, wrote on Facebook.

“No doubt this will spark claims that Israel has a right to defend itself – and it does. But this has nothing to do with defense,” Yarmuth added. “We are witnessing the use of unabated brutality and force against civilians to stifle civil unrest. America must expect and demand more from its close allies.”

As funerals were held in Gaza on Tuesday, Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian protesters the previous day was met with nearly universal condemnation and growing international calls for accountability.

On Tuesday, which marked the annual Palestinian commemoration of Nakba Day, two more protesters – identified as Bilal Budeir Hussein al-Ashram, 17, and Naser Ahmad Mahmoud Ghurab, 51 – were killed during renewed but far smaller protests than those held along Gaza’s eastern perimeter on Monday.

More than 40 others were wounded by live fire and seven children, a paramedic and a journalist were among those reported injured, according to the Palestinian human rights group Al Mezan.

The news that Israel killed more than 60 Palestinians on Monday alone, has sparked criticism from Americans who are frustrated with the United States’ failure to hold one of its closest allies accountable for the human rights violations it is committing—and individuals in one state will soon be labeled as “anti-Semitic” for openly voicing their opinion.

South Carolina will become the first state to legally define criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitism” when a new measure goes into effect on July 1, targeting public schools and universities. While politicians have tried to pass the measure as a standalone law for two years, they finally succeeded temporarily by passing it as a “proviso” that was slipped into the 2018-2019 budget.

Dr. Tarek Loubani decided not to use the tourniquet in his pocket to stop the bleeding when he was shot in the legs at the Gaza border on Monday.

The London, Ont., physician was treating injured Palestinians when he was shot. But he says his wound wasn't serious enough to waste precious medical supplies.

Israeli forces killed at least 60 Palestinians, most by gunfire, and injured more than 2,700 since Monday at the border, Reuters reports. Israel says it is defending its border and has accused Hamas of using protests as a cover for attacks.

Trump had known this in advance, but went ahead anyway, anxious to curry favour with his Zionist masters — to bring a smile to the face of his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, to please his Jewish ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and, above all, to increase the smirk on the face of that Olympic Smirker of Smirkers, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose smirks only equal the exquisite facial contortions brought to perfection by America’s Zionist Puppet president Donald Trump.

“Every country has the right to defend its borders,” Trump barked, without bothering to mention that Israel has no borders and feels it has the right to expand its territories, with remarkable flexibility, into whatever corner of the Middle East it happens to covet.

After the protests in Gaza, we've seen injuries that you see in conflict situations, not what you would expect in policing and law enforcement situations, Omar Shakir, Israel & Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, told RT.

The UN Security Council gathered Tuesday for an emergency meeting following the killing and injuring of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli soldiers during protests on Monday. At least 60 people lost their lives in what's become the deadliest day in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2014. More than 2,700 people were injured, many with live ammunition.

The violence came as the US controversially opened its new embassy in nearby Jerusalem. However, Washington's envoy to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said that there is no link between US Embassy move and deaths of Palestinians.

The true face of the organisation calling itself “Labour Friends of Israel” has been revealed today, in truly disgusting victim-blaming tweets reacting to the massacre of over fifty Palestinians – including yet more children – by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza.

No Israelis were injured and no “border communities” attacked. This amplification of the worst extreme right wing zionist propaganda by the Likud government shows beyond doubt that “Labour Friends of Israel” is nothing whatsoever to do with the professed values of the Labour Party, but rather a well-funded entryist front solely intended to promote the interests of a violent, expansionist and aggressive foreign state.

An Ontario doctor was in Gaza testing 3D-printed tourniquets when he was shot by Israeli snipers firing into a crowd of Palestinian protesters on Monday.

Tarek Loubani, an emergency physician from London, Ont., is recovering after a bullet pierced his right knee and lightly wounded his left leg. At least 58 Palestinians were killed and more than 2,700 wounded in the bloodiest day the region has seen in recent years.

Professor and activist, Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, rejoins the program to share with listeners the on the ground reality in Gaza/Palestine. In the backdrop of the U.S. capital move to Jerusalem, the escalation of war with Iran, and the Israeli bombing in Syria, the Palestinian plight has worsened. Over the last few weeks, the bloodshed has significantly increased with over 100 deaths and over 7000 injuries. The hospitals do not have the necessary supplies to care for the injured which will surely raise the death toll. All of the death and injuries occurred against unarmed civilians resulting in major casualties for the Palestinians and zero injuries for the Israelis. Israelis continue to claim self defense as the world wakens to the insanity of those claims.

Donald Tusk
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@eucopresident
Looking at latest decisions of @realDonaldTrump someone could even think: with friends like that who needs enemies. But frankly, EU should be grateful. Thanks to him we got rid of all illusions. We realise that if you need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of your arm.